Indie-Resource.com

I was browsing youtube over XNA information and games that indie developers have made. I came across this one and was absolutely amazed at how this looks.. Oh and by the way, he made this in ONE WEEK.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q6ISVaM5Ww[/youtube]

I have seen that before, and if I am remembering my timelines correct, that is actually circa XNA 2.0. It has actually been around for quite a while. Sadly, I don't think anything really ever came out of it beyond the tech demo in the video, but it was a great earlier effort that showed that XNA could look AAA in 2D with the right art assets and a steady hand at the code

Yeah thats pretty awesome, I wish I could make something like that

Thats awesome!!

The dynamic lighting was very cool looking, and would be awesome for spell effects, carrying torches, etc. I am assuming since the ground was also being lit-up they are using normal mapping, like this very cool HTML5 canvas normal mapping demo, which obviously is 100% 2D.

Yeah I wanna figure out how they did that lighting, its awesome

You could probably get a good start by reading that page I linked, as he gives at least an overview on how he did it, and he also shares the source code. Of course it is Javascript for HTML5 Canvas, but the basic principles are going to be the same. Since normal mapping can have many, many uses, and both this XNA game and this demo both use them to light up 2D textures, I think it would be highly applicable